From Compilation to Indexing: Tracing the Practice of Early Modern Orientalist Scholarship

How did orientalists read, learn languages, and produce dictionaries, editions, and other works? Annotated manuscripts in particular offer a glimpse into the orientalist’s study, showing the sources they used, their methods of deciphering texts and comparing manuscripts, and their collaboration with amanuenses. Annotations also afford us a view of development over time, charting practices of early modern orientalist scholarship through shifting patterns of note-taking. This talk will trace that history in the early modern period, giving an overview of the conventions of orientalist annotation and focusing on a comparison between manuscripts from the two premier Western European Arabists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively: Jacob Golius and Johann Jacob Reiske. Both scholars’ libraries remain largely intact, and, viewed broadly, offer a perspective onto questions of scholarly specialization, the character of philological progress, and the changing social contexts of orientalist learning.